Missing Banker Shot To Death, New Autopsy Finds

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A second autopsy is raising new questions, and doubts, about who or what killed David Widlak. The body of the 62-year old Macomb County bank president was found in Lake St. Clair over the weekend. A second autopsy revealed a gunshot wound to his head–a wound that wasn’t found during the first exam.

Macomb County medical examiner Daniel Spitz said Wednesday afternoon the new exam found Widlak was shot in the head, instead of simply drowned, as the family had been told.

Spitz said a bullet hole was found at the base of Widlak’s neck, and it was that close-range gunshot that killed him.

“It certainly seems that this gunshot was the cause of death. The manner of death — classification of accident, suicide, homicide — is certainly based on a totality of the evidence,” he said.

Speaking live on WWJ this morning — Macomb County Sheriff Mark Hackle said investigators are baffled.

“We’re having a difficult time finding somebody that really we know for a fact would have wanted to hurt him or harm him,” Hackle said.

“There’s a lot of speculation, and people that we’ve talked to — but, unfortunately, nothing has come to our attention that would point in a direction that somebody is responsible for this death,” he said.

Hackel called the discrepancy between the two autopsies “unfortunate.”

He said no suspects have been identified. The case is still being treated as a homicide, but suicide has not been ruled out.

Divers Wednesday did recover a handgun, registered to Widlak, close to where his body was found.

WWJ and Fox2 legal analyst Charlie Langton says this autopsy situation could help the defense if someone winds up being charged in Widlak’s death.

“If this becomes a criminal investigation, and it appears obviously that it is — if I’m a defense attorney, I’m going to go back to that first autopsy, and I’m going to try to get these two medical examiners to disagree with each other — to create some doubt. And, that to me is terrible,” Langton said.

Langton says, in theory, any past Macomb County case involving a decomposing body could now be called into question.

Widlak was last was seen at the Mount Clemens-based Community Central Bank Corp. on Sept. 19. His car was in the parking lot when a maintenance worker found the offices in disarray the following morning.